[emckay]

This is a big part of the problem, but there is some hope!

Shareholders of the big oil and gas companies have started to recognize the long-term threat of climate change. There were 87[0] shareholder proposals last year that asked firms to adopt emission reduction targets, disclose lobbying expenses, or take other action that would result in lower emissions.

Most of these failed, largely because the big institutional investors voted against them.

Shameless plug: I'm trying to solve this problem by creating a governance-first index fund [1].

[0] https://voting.greengovernance.org [1] https://greengovernance.org

[alistairSH]

You mean the same oil/gas companies that have known about these issues for decades and covered it up?[0] I trust them to do the right thing about as far as I can throw them. If they are making any changes now, it's simply because it's economically sensible, not because they want to save the planet.

0 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

[DownGoat]

They knew about it long before that even. That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and questions about our use of fuels that produce it were raised in the late 1800 hundreds. Climate change is a problem that has been ignored for over 120 years. they had some better excuses for ignoring it in the past, but this is not a new problem. It should have been solved in the past, and not solving it now will lead to disaster.

[0xcde4c3db]

> That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and questions about our use of fuels that produce it were raised in the late 1800 hundreds

And not by Joe Schmoe who it would make sense to ignore, but by Svante Arrhenius.

[hanniabu]

For others that are unaware of who this is, first paragraph from his wikipedia page:

> Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 – 2 October 1927) was a Swedish scientist. Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate. In 1905, he became director of the Nobel Institute, where he remained until his death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius

[cubano]

Don't plants require carbon dioxide to grow? I am not sure it was immediately obvious to people 120 years ago (the Mariner 2 spacecraft, which flew past Venus in 1962, was the first to take detailed pictures showing its heat-trapping clouds) that CO2 was such a "dangerous" thing.

I have recently been made aware of relatively inexpensive massive high density tree planting projects as a way to potentially solve the CO2 "problem"[0] I personally find ideas such as these are far better for world's ultra-poor then raising the price of energy thru carbon taxes, as pretty much the only way people can move into a significantly better living situation is thru the use of energy.

[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2019/07/massive-tree-...

[bryanlarsen]

Only new forests sequester. Old forests are in approximate CO2 balance: rotting trees and the consumption of green mass by wildlife emit CO2 at approximately the same rate as it is absorbed. Since we have a limited area to plant new forests this is only a temporary solution.

But it's important, since it could buy us a few more years to implement more permanent solutions.

[ryanmercer]

>Only new forests sequester

*Younger forests pull the most out over a given period of time. The bulk of the carbon stays locked up as long as the wood doesn't decay/isn't burned. It's one reason some architects are starting to look at structural wood for larger buildings again, as long as the building stands you keep the carbon locked up in the framing. If we had a magic wand we could create a few super-fast growing species and plant massive amounts of forest of complimentary species that provide the soil with nearly everything needed to grow one another and simply harvest the lumber, drag it out to anoxic depths at sea and sink it not unlike the commonly accepted theory of the azolla event doing similar with aquatic ferns in our planet's past.

The best trees can manage about 48lbs of CO2 per year, that's 46 trees per metric tonne and healthy forest is 40-60 trees per acre. Just to go carbon neutral last year that would mean you would have needed at LEAST 53 million square miles of optimal forest. For reference, there are 196.9 million square miles of land on earth, effectively 1/4 of the land mass on earth would need to be 100% optimized decade or two old forest.

Roughly 31% of the earth is forest, however it's far from the above optimal conditions. In reality we'd need probably 50% (if not more) of the earth to be forest to manage what we did last year.

Coincidentally, pre-industrial era the earth was about 48% forest and current estimates are we lose something like 28,125 square miles annually to human operations. We're producing more and more while reducing the planet's ability to sequester.

Sadly planting more trees isn't even going to equate to a bandaid, it's going to be like loosing a limb to a wood chipper and gently blowing on the wound. It's purely a "this makes me feel good" thing.

[0xcde4c3db]

> Don't plants require carbon dioxide to grow?

Yes, but they also require other things to grow, so the scaling of their growth with rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration isn't as impressive as some people imagine, and it's only been empirically demonstrated in the short term. As far as I've read, the main uncertainty as to what happens in the medium-long term relates to how much nitrogen is available in the soil, and how the nitrogen-fixing topsoil ecosystem adapts. If it can thrive in such a way as to fix more nitrogen, that could lead to further plant growth. But it's also plausible that the rapid shift in the environment disrupts that system and leads to a regression in plant growth rates.

[ryanmercer]

And all of that assumes that unseasonably warm/cold temperatures from changing weather patterns, drought or flooding from changing weather patterns, increased wildfires from changing weather patterns etc doesn't kill off many species in an area.

[Nasrudith]

That is like arguing against drowning because you require water. The dose and application make the "poison".

It is even true that the CO2 was at this point before. If it had shifted at geological timescales even if it was from human activity it would be more or less fine as the ecosystem could adapt to it like previous epoches. Certainly there would be extinctions but would give time to adapt and speciate.

Tree planting helps some but it isn't comparable at scale at all - as in running out of available landmass bad.

Tree planting would help the ultrapoor if they maintained it locally given things like impact on soil erosion and rainfall but those are only localized effects

[tasty_freeze]

> Don't plants require carbon dioxide to grow

Of course. Nobody is saying there should be no CO2. But if your implication is that higher CO2 means better growth, it is generally wrong. Some plants do grow better, some don't, in a higher CO2 environment. But more importantly, it isn't as if CO2 is an independent variable. Along with it comes significant changes that plants are not adapted to -- higher average and peak temperatures, more or less rainfall (depending where in the world it is). Yes, given enough time, the plants that make it through the stresses of climate change will adapt and thrive, but in the near term (a few generations of humans) it will cause problems.

> I am not sure it was immediately obvious to people 120 years ago that CO2 was such a "dangerous" thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect

In short: Joseph Fourier (of the Fourier transform) advocated for the idea of atmospheric gasses causing a greenhouse effect. It was advanced along the years, in 1896 Arrhenius even calculated the effect on the climate due to a doubling of CO2. There were scientific papers published in the 50s using the terms "climate change" in the 50s, well before the Mariner 2 spacecraft.

[Retric]

Not all energy sources generate significant CO2 or even cost more than those that do. It’s vastly more efficient to make the least economically expensive changes early than to wait and be forced to use more drastic approaches.

Long term carbon sequestration via forests is extremely expensive as you can’t then use the land for anything else. Not extracting carbon is by far the cheapest option for long term sequestration.

PS: Sequestration of biomass underground is a viable long term option, but it’s again expensive.

[nanomonkey]

Forested land has tons of economic uses, and in many cases it improves the productivity of the other activities that are done within the land. Most human dwellings do better when they are surrounded by trees (lowers cooling/heating costs and improves the sanity of the occupants). Most livestock can be raised in orchards, along with quite a few consumable plants (coffee, cows, mushrooms, etc.). Also the trees themselves can be converted to charcoal through gasification, which provides a carbon feedstock for graphite, activated charcoal, or biochar, all of which lock away the carbon. The gasification process produces syngas/woodgas/producers gas which is a viable fuel source. Lastly the wood can be used itself for building structures and furniture which locks away the carbon for the life of the item.

Not sure how any of that is expensive, as it fulfills our requirements for food, housing, and luxury goods.

[Retric]

The issue with this line of thinking is we are not talking about a single forest or some minor changes to urban settings, but a massive change to the number of forests. The scale is vastly beyond adding more trees near buildings or a few more orchids. Ideally you want massive trees that live a long time and spend as much energy as possible growing larger not making fruit.

This land is not already being used for forests because other uses are simply more useful or less costly. The net loss of utility then needs to continue for as long as the carbon is sequestered.

Finally, if you want to sequester carbon somewhere else you need to collect and transport it which adds more costs. Further, if that’s the goal forests are simply slow carbon sinks in comparison to other plants.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I personally find ideas such as these are far better for world's ultra-poor then raising the price of energy thru carbon taxes, as pretty much the only way people can move into a significantly better living situation is thru the use of energy.

"Carbon tax hurts the poor" is oil industry propaganda. The poor use less carbon than average -- especially the "ultra poor" -- but everyone receives the same dividend. It's a net transfer to the poor.

On top of that, the underlying cost (after accounting for tax, subsidies and regulations) for oil in poorer countries is higher than in richer countries because they have worse infrastructure for delivering fuel. You can put solar panels and batteries on a shack in the middle of a field and have electricity for decades. To do that with a gas generator you need gas stations, vehicles to deliver it, roads to drive them on etc. They don't have those things, and won't get them overnight, but meanwhile you can give them electricity today and they immediately get running water and electric light and wireless telecommunications etc. So oil is garbage for them and they're better off never burning a drop of it while the people who do are paying a carbon tax that funds a dividend they can use to buy solar panels.

[mamon]

It is true but not on individual level, on country level. There are countries that generate > 80% of their energy from fossil fuels and do not have enough money to invest at scale in nuclear, or wind, or solar. Rich Western countries on the other hand invested in clean energy first, and now that they have significant advantage in that area they are trying to impose arbitrary CO2 limits, which is kind of pulling up the ladder behind them - now the poor countries not only have to find money to invest in clean energy, but also twice the amount, to pay penalties for exceeding those limits.

[AnthonyMouse]

> It is true but not on individual level, on country level.

It's true all over the place.

Suppose you live in a country which gets 80% of its energy from fossil fuels. Well, that sucks, so now your average energy costs go up by $1000 a year. You can't afford that! Only you get it all back. You get a $1000 dividend, use it to pay for the same energy you did before, and nothing changes.

Except for one thing. When your country continues its path to industrialization, nobody is ever going to build a new coal fired power plant again. All the new capacity will be non-fossil fuels, because now they're much cheaper relative to coal -- no carbon tax.

The only cost you're really paying is the relative price difference between fossil fuels and alternatives. But that's already close to zero and has non-cost benefits for your country like air quality and energy independence.

Moreover, the idea that this is some cost for developing countries that developed countries didn't have to pay is also a lie. The cost of renewables is driving the cost of fossil fuels down through competition. The carbon tax is only needed to prevent that -- to keep their price back up around their traditional cost, which makes them uncompetitive with the falling price of renewables, so that they die out instead of the lower demand causing their price to fall to the point that they still end up as 20-50% of generation capacity.

[fromthestart]

That's not how science works. Some scientists theorized that CO2 emissions could have consequences for climate. There was a lot of theoretical and technological development that needed to happen before such an outlandish (at the time and up until the recent present) idea could be verified and acted upon. It's no small claim to suggest that humans can not only alter global climate, but do so in a catastrophic manner. Add to the mix the social and economic cost of acting on such a theory, and it makes sense to understand and prove the science with some minimum certainty before using it to justify massive policy change.

Hindsight is 20/20. Even now, because of the nature of what amounts to an empirical science who's primary effects will only be measured in the future, we haven't unambiguously proven that climate change is occuring, and cannot do so without additional decades or centuries of data, at which point it may be too late.

It is similarly fallacious to accuse oil companies of knowing about this problem and failing to act. 30 years ago this was similarly a theory with even less evidence than today, and only a handful of scientists even considered it.

[jellicle]

None of that is true. It has never been considered outlandish except by oil company PR teams. Simple math from the very beginning of the fossil fuel era made it obvious we would eventually run into problems. It has been extremely obvious for decades that the predicted problems were here, now.

There's no social or economic cost to the world for acting to prevent climate change. The costs are all negative - we save vast amounts of money and societal damage by acting.

There hasn't been any serious scientific dispute over whether climate change was occurring for at least 50 years.

And of course it's completely accurate to note that the oil companies knew about the problem and have not only refused to act, but have spent massive amounts to prevent action. Many of their own documents are available on the internet for your inspection.

[fromthestart]

>It has never been considered outlandish except by oil company PR teams.

You're describing catastrophic terraforming on the scale of about 100 years. That's a huge claim with enormous ramifications and given the current expense of mitigation, it rightly warrants scrutiny, both in probability of occurance and scope of change.

>Simple math from the very beginning of the fossil fuel era made it obvious we would eventually run into problems.

Absolutely nothing about climate change is simple. Which is why it took decades to establish any kind of consensus. Global climate is a chaotic function of various positive and negative feedback mechanisms - simply noting that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses may cause climate change is not nearly enough to conclude that there is a problem without considering the hugely complex system in it's entirety.

>It has been extremely obvious for decades that the predicted problems were here, now.

We've been collecting the very data necessary to prove the "obviousness" of climate change over the same decades in which you claim the problem was already evident. You need time series data to establish a trend with any kind of certainty, and climate changes at a minimum over hundreds of years.

>There's no social or economic cost to the world for acting to prevent climate change. The costs are all negative - we save vast amounts of money and societal damage by acting.

Like the rest of your post, your perspective is biased by your assertion that climate change is happening. You need to view this from the perspective of a society which has not had time to perform the necessary data gathering and analysis to make such conclusion - in which case, there are now and were decades ago current costs to switching off of fossil fuels, which it would only be reasonable to incur given a minimum degree of certainty in future climate change. It is simply infesible to make drastic policy changes for every sounded alarm - one must obviously consider the expected value of the change, which is (disaster cost)*(probability of disaster)-(cost of change). The value of this probability is difficult to model and has been steadily increasing with recent climate science.

>There hasn't been any serious scientific dispute over whether climate change was occurring for at least 50 years.

Just decades ago the consensus was that of global cooling. Again, you underestimate the complexity of determining whether the climate is actually changing and, in particular, how it will change in the future.

>And of course it's completely accurate to note that the oil companies knew about the problem

Again, oil companies did not "know" of the problem, they were aware of the possibility of the problem. The very documents which you mention state that additional modeling was required to determine anything with certainty.

[jammygit]

As somebody in an oil and gas town, I can assure you that more than zero oil and gas company owners and executives think global warming is a paranoid delusion or even a political conspiracy

Not everyone of course, but I just want to point out that “they know about it and are hiding it” isn’t always accurate. There is a lot of denial

[chrisBob]

I am pretty sure there is a famous quote along the lines of "It is hard to make a man understand something when his private jet trips depend on him not understanding it" :)

[Dumblydorr]

They won't allow their core profit centers to br disrupted.

[some_random]

Of course, which is why it's in their best interests to do something now to avoid massive disruption later from potentially disastrous (for them) regulation.

[asdff]

They will pen their own regulation like they've always done.

[mushufasa]

I created a web app for shareowners to take action. It's free to use, we're not selling investments.

www.yourstake.org

We're actively trying to improve the site. There should be a movement of shareholders. Please reach out with feedback! I'd like to talk to you.

[Paul-ish]

Just a heads up, the sign up for your newsletter has a really irritating reCAPTCHA. I have gone through at multiple grids to no avail. I have given up at this point. The newsletter is not worth it.

[emckay]

Really sorry about that :(

I'm using TinyLetter by MailChimp, and I don't have any control over that page. I'll look into other providers in the future.

[Bantros]

The long-term threat is that they are finite

[bryanlarsen]

There is far more oil, coal and natural gas in the ground than there is capacity in the atmosphere to absorb the resulting CO2.

[AlanSE]

The atmosphere can absorb it, but many ecosystems (the important ones for people) cannot survive the resulting changes in climate.

[bryanlarsen]

Of course.

I tried adding a similar caveat to my message, but my feeble attempts muddied my simple message. Even your caveat is slightly over-simplified because there's a significant time component: most ecosystems would probably be OK if the oil was burned over a few million years rather than a few decades.

[Bantros]

Is that a fact?

[Robotbeat]

Yes. Oil and gas and coal proven reserves of burned would produce about 4.5 trillion tons of CO2. About half of that would remain in the atmosphere. There’s currently about 2 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere today at 400ppm. So in proven reserves alone, we have enough to more than double the current CO2 levels, or triple/quadruple them from pre-industrial levels (when they were ~280ppm).

...but the real kicker is that proven reserves are just a small fraction of total likely recoverable reserves long-term. Proven reserves basically assumes no tech improvement and no exploration, two things we’re continually doing. So proven reserves have actual GROWN over time and likely will. There are truly vast amounts of fossil fuels available that could be tapped if we had to tap them.

For instance, there’s over a trillion barrels of kerogen/oilshale oil (which is expensive to extract, like Canada’s oil sands) in JUST the Green River formation in Colorado/Wyoming, more than all the world’s proven oil reserves combined. But it sits untapped because oil prices are so low. And practically all of northern Alaska has coal underneath it if you drill to the right depth, 5 trillion tons (~18 trillion tons of CO2), more than four times all the world’s coal proven reserves combined. Source: https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-077/

America alone has enough fossil fuels in the ground to single-handedly double or triple or sextuple the CO2 level. Add in similar fossil fuel amounts in much of Africa, South America, Russia, Canada, Antarctica, Australia, and the world’s oceans, and the planet would be unrecognizable.

There’s enough fossil fuels (if we tried hard enough) to get the CO2 levels in the 10,000 ppm range where there are serious long term health effects from just breathing the stuff. And psychological effects start becoming apparent at just 500-1000ppm, which we will see by the end of the century or so.

So yeah, we’ll run out of atmosphere to dump the CO2 into before we run out of fossil fuels.

[Bantros]

Thanks for the information

[adrianN]

Yes. We have more than twenty years of fossil fuel reserves. We need to be carbon neutral in less than twenty years if we want to stay below 2° of warming.